The Troubled Dream of Life: Living with Mortality

Callahan will be troubling if you demand the latest and most expensive healthcare, even though the treatment will only extend your life a brief period-life at any cost! The author is not decrying medicine, health care, or related technologies. He does, however, state that other things to consider are the patient's age, the value of improving the person's quality of life, (is their condition terminal?), and financial costs to the patient and her family. For example, should an 85 year old person with a chronic heart condition be able to receive a heart transplant if it would only extend the patient's life a few months, and the surgery might actually kill the person? If a family member is in a "consistent vegetative state", should the family keep the body alive at all costs? Callahan asks hard questions and points out that there are no simple answers. This book is a great starting point for beginning a long overdue discussion on ethics and healthcare.

I've never read another book quite like this one. The author describes the history of society's attitude toward death and how it has changed with advances in medicine. Early on, death was accepted at any age as inevitable and in its own time. This attitude is contrasted with our modern-day concept of life being forever, with all of us hanging on by our fingernails until the last gasp. The examples, particularly ones from the Civil War of the mortally wounded soldiers preparing themselves to become corpses, affected me profoundly. I haven't seen life or death the same since reading this book.Are we asking too much of our doctors? Are we ungracious or blind in our wish to ignore the inevitable? These days, someone must be at fault for a death; someone should pay. Very little grace when confronting the vast eternal that comes to us all. Or are we, after all, entitled to life everlasting on earth if only science and medicine could just hurry up?